At BOMB: Jonas Mekas Talks to Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rome, 1967

We heard this was coming! Jonas Mekas writes about Pier Paolo Pasolini for the newest issue of BOMB!

& now, here is me, in the depths of Brooklyn, years later, here I am by my table covered with your poetry, films, novels, essays. Here I am myself, now, wrestling with it all, reliving your life, from Friuli to Napoli to Rome to Palestine to India to Africa to Chaucer to Marquis de Sade, and yes, your mother, always the mother & I remember my own mother singing by herself, in the morning kitchen, me still half asleep, she was always singing; yes, your mother, Friuli, she was always there, Friuli was always there ...

Though we'd be content if it were, this is not simply a review of Pasolini's Selected Poetry (University of Chicago Press 2014), edited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli. But Mekas--poet, filmmaker, and artist--met Pasolini in June 1967 in Rome; and BOMB has also published excerpts from their conversation, held in Pasolini's apartment. What on earth would you rather be reading!

[Jonas Mekas] European political movements are always very conscious, based on the experiences you described, but in America we have very little political experience. Artistic movements—and even political ones like strikes and student movements—did not start as conscious political movements, but as personal reactions, and only later gained a larger political leaning and consciousness. Now they are approaching, sort of, Marxist thinking, in a sense, but they started as personal reactions first, as a not wanting to stand the situation as it was. We say, "We don't know what's ahead of us, but we don't want to be where we are." That may be the major difference between American and European younger generations, with the latter always wanting to have, at the beginning, a political purpose and an aim before they act. The question that always meets us in Europe is: "What is your aim?" We say, "Our aim is to get out from where we are." That's why they often call us anarchists.

[Pier Paolo Pasolini] In Europe, too, however, there are similar experiences. The Bohème poets of the nineteenth century, for example, and the, let's call them Rimbaudians, they've lived this experience.

JM And the Dutch provos now ... We know that in America today there are seven million cameras in people's homes, seven million 8mm and 16mm cameras. We will take cinema away from the industry and give it to the people in their homes. That is the whole meaning of what's called Underground Cinema. By taking cinema away from the industry and by exaggerating, by saying that EVERYONE can make films, we are freeing those seven million cameras. Any child who grows up in a home and sees that camera—he could already do something else with it other than take tourist movies. He could do something with it. I think that eventually these seven million cameras can become a political force in this way: all aspects of reality will be covered. Eventually the camera will go into the prisons, into the banks, into the army, and help us to see where we are, so that we can go out of here and go somewhere else. We want to give these seven million cameras a voice.

PPP I've got my doubts ... how many typewriters are there in America? I don't mean to ridicule your hope, on the contrary. But I'm trying to find out why you find the cinema a better road to liberation than literature?

JM Because with a typewriter you write your own fantasies, you reflect your own distortions, your own dreams. Good; you write poetry. But the camera shows reality, bits of reality, faces and situations. Because this is not Hollywood or Cinecittà filmmaking, which are staged. But these seven million cameras will be used to film reality "as it is." Nothing can be hidden behind a face that you actually see.

PPP I can see exactly where your problem lies. . . .

At top: Jonas Mekas, Pier Paolo Pasolini at his home in Rome, Summer 1967.